Sony and Panasonic Announce New High Definition Camcorder

[Stereo]

Sony and Panasonic Announce New High Definition Camcorder Format
by David Kender
Published on May 11, 2006




BREAKING NEWS May 11, 2006 - Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic) today have just announced a co-developed high definition DVD format specifically for camcorders. The new AVCHD format captures video onto 8cm DVDs, using the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression system. It records video at 18 Megabits per second, which is signifigantly higher than existing standard defintiion DVD camcorders, but lower than the HDV format. The companies have been working on the format together for over a year.


“Basically, there’s been this huge market shift to high definition. At the same time, with camcorders, there is a trend towards optical discs or DVD camcorders,” said Yolanda Hunt-Boes, Sony Spokesman “Both companies have been looking at high definition on this solution, and in the second half of 2005, on the engineering level we came together and said, we’ve been doing this separately lets move forward together.”

The format effectively compresses HD into a small enough data stream that it can fit onto existing 8 cm DVD discs. It appears that, instead of releasing a next generation optical disc camcorder, companies are wedging HD onto existing technology in order to provide consumers with HD optical discs as soon as possible. Interestingly, this is the same strategy that is being used with HDV, the current tape-based HD consumer standard. HDV tapes squeeze a compressed HD signal onto MiniDV tapes, which are a decade old technology.

[Mitica]